Letter of Recommendation

Enlarge the place of your tent, stretch your tent curtains wide, do not hold back. Lengthen your cords, strengthen your stakes. For you will spread out to the right and to the left (Isaiah 54:2-3).

In the early days of pioneering UBF, we saw in this verse a call to world mission. William Carey, the great missionary to India, also saw God’s world mission purpose in these verses. One of our favorite mottos was “Bible Korea; World mission; Enlarge the place of your tent.” Through Bible study we strengthen our stakes and through prayer we lengthen our cords. We enlarge the place of our tent as we spread the gospel to the world as a part of the whole Church.

We also strengthen our stakes when we remember how God has worked in us and among us in the past. In order to develop a sense of history, our General Director, Abraham Kim, appointed Charles Kim as the chairman of the UBF History Committee. One area of his interest is our spiritual heritage. It did not exist in the early days when our ministry began. When Samuel Lee passed away some of our senior members gathered and jotted down the list of spiritual heritage. "Back to the Bible" is the first one of them. It addresses the importance of making Bible study central in our ministry.

My friend, Charles Kim, has explored its meaning from the point of Jesus. In this series of writings, he seeks to show how Jesus used and valued the Bible in his own life and ministry. In teaching the crowds and the Pharisees and his disciples Jesus used such phrases as: “Haven’t you read…”, “it is written…” Jesus made imaginative references to Jonah and to the donkey Jesus rode, showing how Jesus fulfilled Scripture. Jesus rebuked the Sadducees for not knowing Scripture or the Power of God. He challenged the Pharisees to study the Bible more deeply—“Go and find what this means…” Jesus made it clear that he had not come to do away with the law but to fulfill it. May we come to know Jesus better as read these writings and think about how Jesus used and obeyed the Bible in his teaching and in his life.

By Sarah Barry, General Director Emeritus
Nov. 7, 2013